Breaking the chains, winning the games, and saving Western Civilization.

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Sailer's Law: literary edition

Sailer's Law of Female Journalism: The most heartfelt articles by female
journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in
order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be
considered hotter-looking.

So you read all these books, as many as you can, and it becomes difficult not to notice a pattern. You realize all the girls in all the books are just different kinds of skinny. You can’t for the life of you find a girl that looks like you. Books are supposed to help us dream and dream big but you’re starting to feel like you’re just too big to dream. You’ve read a couple books where fat girls get to be loved in the real world, and that’s wonderful, but fat girls don’t get whisked away into alternate worlds and told they’re a long lost princess. Fat girls don’t get to see the magical underside of New York City. Fat girls don’t save planets.

It's not about being too big to dream, it's about being too fat to do anything active. Unless a writer is sufficiently inventive to come up with a plot that concerns saving the planet through the heroic act of finishing off four large bags of Doritos at a sitting, how exactly are these fat girls going to actually do anything?

Anyhow, it's a little ironic, given that there are not exactly a dearth of fat women writing SFF YA, as this portrait of 2014 Nebula winners demonstrates. Forget saving planets, that pair of superchubs look like they could devour planets.

If writers can invent worlds where skinny women are ass-kicking, kickboxing, expert pistol shooting badasses, surely they can also invent worlds where fatties are desirable and do stuff besides sit on the couch and eat!

Faith isn't plus size, she's enormous and revolting. She can fly and has telekinesis because she's too fat to walk to the refrigerator or lift something. Why move an arm when you can levitate a mouthful with your magic.

Guys, guys--It's not hard to put "curvy" heroines in our sci-fi. Frank Herbert already addressed the issue with Baron Harkonnen--you just have to have her surrounded by a ring of anti-gravity suspensors.

I get dizzy, I get numboWhen I'm dancingWith my jum, jum jumbo...Can she prance up a hill?No, no, no, no, noCan she dance a quadrill?No, no, no, no, noDoes she fit in my coupe?By herself she's a bruteCould she possiblySit upon my knee?No, no, no

"surely they can also invent worlds where fatties are desirable and do stuff besides sit on the couch and eat!"

Yeah, that's the main obstacle. They need some kind of artifice to explain why in this book's universe a 1.5 waist to hip ratio is attractive. It's harder than making an ass-kicking heroine because, unlike being an ass-kicker, no one ever wanted to be a fat-ass. It would be as difficult as making horrible dental hygiene attractive. "No one with rotten teeth and shit-breath ever got whisked into an alternate world and told she's a princess."

Envy as a social stance. I like that. I have been trying to do that a lot lately; identify the specific context behind behavior and identify it with one specific word. When I can do that with clarity, it helps bring into focus what other influences are there. I.E. you rarely have gluttony without sloth and shame.

In THE FUTURE, SCIENCE will give us all anti-inflammatorys that actually don't kill you and have zero side-effects. And so the women will probably ALL become filthy, grubbing gluttons with:-no joint pain-no diebeetus-no body odor- etc. etc.

You know, I'm not perfect myself, and I try not to be too harsh to people, but when you're genuinely starting to look like the Brood Mother from Dragon Age, you should probably suspend your fat fantasy lobbying. When you're so fat that you're wider than you are tall, and your arms are DISAPPEARING into their own rolls of lard, you're actually becoming the universal symbol of everything loathable in most fantasy worlds.

They absolutely should put more fat girls in fantasy. As villains. If it ever gets optioned for a movie or series, you can write it off as affirmative action casting, and you don't look like an idiot as you try to make something awful into something to be envied.

It's not about being too big to dream, it's about being too fat to do anything active. Unless a writer is sufficiently inventive to come up with a plot that concerns saving the planet through the heroic act of finishing off four large bags of Doritos at a sitting, how exactly are these fat girls going to actually do anything?

I can think of plenty of ways a fat chick could save the day.

1. Orbital slingshot. 2. Drop her down a gravity well to cause a giant planet-side explosion.3. Redirect a radiation pulse with gravitational lensing.4. Achieve fusion, renewable energy for all.

I loved Peter Parker because he was bookwormy like me and full of self pity like me and felt awkward like me... BUT he was also Spiderman! And he could luck ass and take names.

The last thing a fat girl wants to read about is a fat heroine because she knows, no matter how wonderful and powerful she is, the alpha never chooses the fat girl. And if he did it would BREAK the fantasy spell, destroying her willing suspension of disbelief.

A nerd can dream of being Spiderman, but a fat kid can only see himself as the Blob.

I doubt fat heroines (like "Faith") can be commercially successful. Fat women hate being fat - they get negative feedback for it every moment of every day. No amount of whining about "fat shaming" is going to change the lack of interest from men, the pain in the joints, sagging, sweating, lack of energy, etc, etc. There's no way someone like that is going to fantasize about having magical powers or whatever without also fantasizing she was able to lose enough weight to be active and attractive.